It’s not that easy. To delete someone means changing a good portion of social environment. If it’s a serious study, they would’nt want to do such radical changes.
As for your last thought: you would be surprised at how much people are robots. We have very little free-will, if at all. We walk most of the day on auto-pilot, and we are generally programmed to act as a herd, geneticaly.
Of course, I believe that simulating my mind is a lot easier than simulating many minds…
I agree with portions of the above post, exept the humans are robots thing. We have complete free will. That doesnt mean were not programmed, we merely have rules and physics programmed in.
Like a video game.
You have free will to choose where you walk and what you do, but you have to stay in the rules that are preset.
claps hands time to revive this thing.
So I actually found a forum and wiki page devoted to people who believe life is a video game/matrix.
check it out at simulism.com/Simulism
some interesting points that i found on the site (ironically that i thought before i even found it)
i find this interesting just like the fact that we could be in a simulation that is soo miniscule, to think that our simulation could be so basic, yet its all we know.
anyway hope this gets people re-thinking and some ideas going cuz i feel like talking about this again.
Cartesian Skepticism, why have you betrayed us?
Normally this dilemma is approached as a thought-experiment. When one unequivocally takes the Brain in a Vat hypothesis as truth, some intriguing moral questions arise. Is there life after BSOD? Can a glitch cause people to spontaneously combust? Is our Matrix running Linux?
Please. There is a reason few seriously consider these variations on the Malevolent Demon/Matrix/Brain in a Jar/Ancestor Simulation/etc. hypotheses. Their grounds can never be proven or disproven, and even if it were true, it should not affect how we live our lives.
Glad to be back, btw.
no religion should affect the way we live our lives, yet it does. i just fail to see why so many immediately reject the hypothesis and it saddens me that so many just state their religion and lock the doors. i like openness. i like contemplation.
the question is when we finally make a simulation of our own, will we see the connection and begin to accept the hypothesis as valid and not ridiculous?
unfortunately, i think not.
anyway, welcome back madman
Holy smokes, I’ve only read the first 3 pages, some pretty deep, very possible food for thought.
I’ll take the blue pill thank you very much. 
maybe there are ‘glitches’ in the world, but they were discovered right at the beginning and things began to take them 4 granted/ evlove with them.
when you say something is something and then sit around trying to reason that this statement is true, you have to ignore any other contrary examples and use them to further explain your current world-view.
I enjoy discussions like this, but aren’t you just replacing God with Programmers? One supernatural force with another. Because you can’t really argue against the theory that our existence is a simulation, just like you can’t argue against any religion. Good theory though 
that sounds like the tower of Babel
(LucidEpiphany)
Don’t you trust 'em their all puppets love is nothing scared of success.
Never do a dance with the devil now.
These smiles are a sign that we’re selling out.
Its obvious to me that were still hungry
For these ups and down’s maybe get lucky.
Go ahead and get mad at God,
Point your finger at your dad and ask Santa Clause.
Liten all of yall its a sabotage
Lets see how bad it looks with the bandage off.
Puppets, by Atmosphere 
lol
You just showed me that song
We just had a big discussion about this, on IM.
I didn’t really have anything to say because I agree with you
But, yes, the programmer can be God
I don’t believe he/she/it/other has complete control
&sry I haven’t been on aim, LucidEpiphany,I haven’t been on long enough to have a discussion (or a lecture, lol 
)
I just had a thought today, like the guy who thought therefore he was.
I could be just in some simulation, in some other life… for what? Training? Punishment? Other, please state?
In that case, all of you are fake. And this place will really make me believe that you are real in any way it can.
Of course, with tech like that, there’s bound to be some real people "online-play"ing.
The rest are just androids made of chemicals.
And, you get the idea, although this thoughtline gets very antisocial…
… or does it? or is it just the simulation stopping me from thinking about that, along with its mindless androids who object to being called that, until it is over and I return?
Wait, LE has AIM? Fake or not, or an online player, or maybe an inside job guiding me out of this, I still want your AIM.
mine is “seejay.(eleven)@gmail.com”.
Replace (eleven) with the number, spambots aren’t this advanced yet!
EDIT2: Why is it MY consciousness embodying these seemingly innocent bundles of fast-reacting molecules?
Is randomness true?
Do we have free will, or is it the molecules speaking?
score under, thats an email… not aim.
and yes. i am fake.
i can’t believe this is what some people believe, I hope its not because of a movie, wait thats exactly what it is.
waves his hand
There is no matrix…
finishes waving his hand
Listen eyes and ears,
what the matrix means is metaphor for spirituality more then mechanization… spirits move through human beings willy-nilly.
Essentially the message of the film is that we are playing a game with G(o)od and “evil”,
but its more aptly but illusion and reality
illusion is the programs that go in and out of brains that keep society alive and vibrating in a post-industrial manner, and those who are in Christ-consciousness are people like Morpheus who, called guru, browse the universal-one-mind-plex-a-thingy, and see “ah, someone is ready to wake up” so Guru finds you and you study under them, and then you wake other people up
the other thing to note is synchronicity which is an operation of God which is an operation of Higher Self, this is simply the picking up of messages through the mass-media.
the Matrix is not some sort of elaborate conspiracy by evil people, its some sort of elaborate conspiracy by God, who invented evil so that he could play a game,a nd win the game
so what you are beset with is 01010101
as in, true lie true lie true lie true lie
and you pick up the truth and you follow it down the rabbit hole
and it leads to nirvana, and it leads to freedom
and anything that makes you feel BAD is a lie, including some sort of philosophical dogma about conspiracise and matrixes and simulated realities.
because when you focus on what is bad you give it power and amplify it, and it robs you, and you shoot yourself in the foot, because then you forget about what is good
and when you focus on what is good you kill what is bad because it doesn’t get to take your energy because you aren’t harrassing it with judgmentality all the time.
morpheus spake., and he was not me.
further more everyONE is real, its just that everyONE is everyONE, what you are dealing with in the realm of illusions is the inner-working of spirits, thought-programs, when you look someone in the eye and listen for the silence between their words, you can see that they come from the same nothingness, the same “fakeness” that you do, and fake is not real because what is real cannot ever be fake
not even dreams are fake,
the word fake here is completely false, dangerous, and wrong
when they taught that there was no spoon, it is because one principle of creation is VOIDNESS, is feminine womb, is emptiness, as most matter is just empty space held together, no ? there is no spoon for a huge plethora of reasons, but one of which is just that the spoon is a creation of imagination, and from the right vantage point we can see that within any-thing is contained the entire universe and all other things
within the water is the sun for the sun evaporates water which causes clouds to form which causes rain, and within the water is just about anything else, and so to use this idea of simulated reality to hate people is just going to shoot yourself in the foot one day, because its not really the point
being dispassionate at ILLUSIONS is understandable, and pre-requisite to witnessing beauty and the inter-connection of all, but don’t sit and sputter like an angry-android constantly pointing your finger at the lies because its all a perspective issue.
Hey, I wasn’t saying that this projected reality is anything to get mad at people about, I was just saying that it is rather inconvenient that we cannot see our true forms, who is real, understand the kind of stuff we should be able to understand but is beyond human comprehension, etc.
Unfortunately I haven’t had the time to read through this entire thread, so if this post is nothing but simple repetition of things already said, I apologize.
First of all, your idea is de facto a view of the world closely resembling a theistic one, with the “programmers” serving as god/gods. Whether our reality, in this case, is “real” or not is irrelevant.
Let me clarify this statement a bit by trying to define “reality”. One could say that reality means everything existant. What, then, actually exists? If this were all just a program/simulation of some sorts, would our reality be nonexistant or simply existant in “smaller” or different form, for example lines of code?
Your idea sounds, to me at least, exactly like a theistic view of the world. We were, along with our world, created by something else, some greater or more advanced entity. The form in which we exist is of no importance, as long as we exist.
And we do exist, because we think. Cogito, ergo sum.
Finally, I would like to add that the idea is, of course, mere speculation. It cannot be proved false or true, but there is no evidence to support it whatsoever. It is, at best, vaguely possible.